There was no room in my mind for concerns
about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of
research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving
of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never
before experienced."

It was to be a story exploring
the myth of the Messiah. It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an
energy machine. It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics. It
was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls. It was to have an
awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance.
Potable water was to be an analog for oil and for water itself, a substance whose supply
diminishes each day. It was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones, as well
as a story about people and their human concerns with human values, and I had to monitor
each of these levels at every stage in the book. There wasn't room in my head to think
about much else." "...You don't write for success. That takes part of your
attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing:
writing. - from "When I was writing Dune", introduction to 'Heretics of
Dune'.